She also said Europe can not allow Greece, a country that recently received a major bailout from the European Union, cause “chaos” by closing its borders.
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“Do you really think that all the euro countries last year fought to the last-and we were the toughest-to keep Greece in the eurozone, only to plunge Greece into chaos, so to speak, a year later?”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a Sunday night interview with German television that even though she at times despairs over the refugee crisis, she believes it is her “damn duty to do everything” she can to help Europe find a collective solution to the challenge.
She lambasted countries that have tightened border controls or capped asylum applications – Austria and the Balkan countries Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia – putting more pressure on Greece, the favored entry point to Europe by migrants arriving by boat.
Austria has already imposed a similar limit in defiance of the European Commission, which warned it was illegal under global law.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the actions of protesters who shouted abuse at a bus full of migrants earlier this month were “repulsive” and “unjustifiable”.
Germany is threatening to close its borders to asylum-seekers in an attempt to persuade other governments to do more to solve the migrant crisis. So too does the majority of Germans, according to the ARD survey.
“I am firmly convinced that the path I have started down is the right one”, Merkel said, adding that she was optimistic her proposals would succeed.
Merkel has repeatedly demanded a pan-European solution to the migrant crisis: a mandatory relocation of refugees.
Any closure of Germany’s borders would have to be approved by Mrs Merkel. Austria and several eastern European counties have called for Greece’s northern borders to be closed as an alternative way to stop the influx.
Stephan Weil, the Social Democrat premier of the state of Lower Saxony, hit back on Sunday, calling for a bigger social services budget as the country accommodates over a million migrants.
“The finance minister obviously just doesn’t get it”, Weil told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Surprisingly, her biggest supporters on the refugee crisis were in the opposition Green Party: some 67 percent of them are happy with the way she is dealing with the issue.
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Pointing to the high cost of integrating migrants, Weil said: “We can not create the impression that this is happening at the expense of the weaker members of our society”. In 2015, 1.1 million refugees crossed the border into Germany, and potentially more may come in 2016.
